What can the UK learn from China on renewable energy?

Speaker 1 This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

Speaker 2 Vanity Fair calls Brit Box a delicious streamer. Collider says everyone should be watching.
Catch Britain's next best series with Britbox. Stream acclaimed new originals like Code of Silence.

Speaker 2 You read lips, right? And Linley, based on the best-selling mystery series.

Speaker 3 See I Lindley.

Speaker 2 Take it from here. And don't miss the new season of Karen Pirry coming this October.
You don't look like police.

Speaker 4 I'll take that as a compliment.

Speaker 2 See it differently when you stream the best of British TV with Britbox. Watch with a free trial today.

Speaker 5 Your global campaign just launched.

Speaker 6 But wait, the logo's cropped.

Speaker 5 The colors are off. And did Legal clear that image? When teams create without guardrails, mistakes slip through.
But not with Adobe Express, the quick and easy app to create on-brand content.

Speaker 5 Brand kits and lock templates make following design guidelines a no-brainer for HR sales and marketing teams.

Speaker 5 And commercially safe AI, powered by Firefly, lets them create confidently so your brand always shows up polished, protected and consistent everywhere. Learn more at adobe.com slash go slash express.

Speaker 4 You have downloaded BBC Inside Science with me, Marnie Chesterton, first broadcast on the 9th of October 2025.

Speaker 4 Hello, it's awards week in Science World. We'll be untangling the quantum experiment that won the Nobel Prize for Physics, plus a large dose of joy from some large, bizarre animals.

Speaker 4 Comedian Josie Long and I talk extinct megafauna, the subject of her new stand-up tour. And Penny Sasha from the New Scientist joins me in the studio to bring all the latest science you need to know.

Speaker 4 What can we expect, Penny?

Speaker 8 Something surprising about the moon.

Speaker 4 First up, it's pretty much one year since Inside Science reported on the closure of the UK's last coal power station. We became the first major economy to go coal-free.

Speaker 4 This week, another milestone, this time a global one. For the first time, renewable energy has leapfrogged coal to become this planet's biggest source of electricity.

Speaker 4 And China is leading the charge, adding more solar and wind capacity than the rest of the world combined in the first half of this year.

Speaker 4 For a country with a reputation as a coal-burning polluter, this may seem like a surprise. Why is China so fast in the race to renewables?

Speaker 4 And what are scientists in the UK learning from a country that can install 100 solar panels a second? We thought we'd ask two engineers who work there.

Speaker 4 Welcome Zulfika Khan, chartered engineer and visiting professor at Bournemouth University and Tsinghua University in Beijing. Hello.
Hello.

Speaker 4 And Ferung Li, professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Bath. You've just got back from a work trip to China.
What do you make of the progress since your last trip?

Speaker 9 It's a pace of change. It's astonishing.

Speaker 9 We see more of renewable energy. We see more of the pyrons.

Speaker 9 But what we see most developed than last time is electric vehicles. Half of the car in the streets are electric vehicles.

Speaker 9 It's a mature supply chain developed in China, not overnight, but over 20 years.

Speaker 4 Zulfiko, why is renewable energy generation so established in China?

Speaker 3 The first and the most important thing is the targeted investments and then the technological collaborations

Speaker 3 and then the robust in-house research and development in all areas of renewable energy technologies, i.e. wind, solar and EV.

Speaker 4 When was the last time you were in Beijing? I mean and what was the most impressive renewables innovation that you saw?

Speaker 3 They just commissioned the biggest wind turbine and it was phenomenal. So it's the combination of like onshore and offshore wind turbines technology, but also

Speaker 3 the development and the manufacturing enhancement in the solar PV, the photovolta.

Speaker 4 Yeah, so we should just stop to note that. I mean, biggest ever offshore wind turbine, right? And then

Speaker 4 pretty impressive stats about solar panel installation. So is this about investing in the infrastructure?

Speaker 3 If we look into the solar PV investment, that is 10 times of all Europe combined.

Speaker 3 So again, it's phenomenal. But as I kind of like mentioned, it's the blend of technological innovation and enhancement.
So the major contributor was the solar panels panels manufacturing.

Speaker 3 China has over 80% of shares at all stages of manufacturing. We see like the 2000 where the patents from China in terms of renewable energy, they were only 5% of the global take-up.

Speaker 3 But now they are 75% of global clean energy patent application. So

Speaker 3 you could feel the thrust behind the renewable energy technology progress and initiatives.

Speaker 4 Farung, bringing you in here because your engineering work is kind of the other end of the spectrum from Zulfika. It's about the big scale things.
It's the power grids and increasing the efficiency.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 this is an area where, intriguingly, China is learning from us, right?

Speaker 9 I was in China in early September, really tried bringing the UK experts to China to share the UK's 35 years experience in power markets.

Speaker 9 That's essentially saying that infrastructure development is one thing, it's important thing, and China is extremely strong and well known for its beat its own target.

Speaker 9 But on the other hand, how to maximize the use of assets already on the ground, that is where UK is world leading.

Speaker 4 So it's about increasing their efficiency of their grids, right?

Speaker 9 There is a suggestion from the latest recorded data. China is already reaching carbon peak, the target set in 2030, five years ahead of the target.

Speaker 9 And that actually resting on a system could be much more efficient. So this kind of system is well operated, functioning in the UK

Speaker 9 over 35 years, and it's just about to be introducing in China by the end of this year.

Speaker 4 Zulfika, it's not all glowing for China, is it? I mean, unlike the UK, China is still building coal power stations, isn't it?

Speaker 3 That's true. The consumption, if we compare with

Speaker 3 the rest of the globe, it has been quite significant. But like, as we see from

Speaker 3 2015 to 2023, the fossil fuel use in final energy across buildings, industry, and transport in China fell by 1.7%.

Speaker 3 So it's relative

Speaker 3 and it is hoped that this drop will continue and the rise of the renewable energy technology will skew that.

Speaker 4 We're going to have to leave it there. Zulfika Khan and Farong Lee, thank you both very much.
It's glitz and glamour week for science at the moment as the Nobel Prizes are handed out.

Speaker 4 This week the Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to John Clarke, Michelle H. Devereux and John M.

Speaker 4 Martinez for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electrical circuit. There's a lot to unpick in that sentence and this is the show to do it.

Speaker 4 Probably the only show to do it. You are very welcome.

Speaker 4 So quantum mechanics is a 100 100-year-old theory and it describes how things behave at the small scale, atoms and subatomic atoms like electrons and protons.

Speaker 4 It is notoriously difficult to understand and explain, but thankfully here to stop us from getting entangled is science journalist and author Phil Ball. Welcome to Inside Science, Phil.

Speaker 4 Thank you, Marnie. Last time we saw each other was at a quantum conference on Heligoland where physicists were arguing over fundamental differences in this theory.

Speaker 4 And yet, today's Nobel is for work done in the 1980s that shows that this is more than just philosophy. It's usable.
It's real. So what did these Nobel Prize winners actually create?

Speaker 4 Let's talk through that first.

Speaker 10 Okay, it's quantum mechanics. So you have to hold on to your hats.

Speaker 10 But as you said, Marnie, we normally think of quantum mechanics as the theory we use to describe really, really small things, atoms and subatomic particles and so on.

Speaker 10 What these guys have done is to show that it can also apply to pretty big things, things you can almost see with the naked eye.

Speaker 10 That was an idea that was suggested by another Nobel laureate, Tony Leggett, in the late 1970s.

Speaker 10 And specifically, he suggested maybe you'll be able to see quantum mechanical effects in basically a bit of superconducting wire that's a metal wire that has been cooled down so far that it can conduct electricity without any electrical resistance.

Speaker 10 And this is something, this is a property that quantum mechanics makes possible. That's what they set out to do in the early 1980s.

Speaker 4 Okay, so when we say macroscopic, I do think of things like, I don't know, the laptop or glass of water in front of me.

Speaker 4 They're using it in terms of a river of electrons within this superconducting wire.

Speaker 10 This is all relative, so macroscopic in this case means micrometer sized, but you know that is massive compared to atoms.

Speaker 10 What's quantum mechanical about this system is the current that's going around it, this so-called supercurrent. Normal electrical currents are electrons moving through a metal.

Speaker 10 What's happened here is that the rules of quantum mechanics have made the electrons essentially sort of join up into pairs into a very weird state that allows them all to flow as though they're one single quantum mechanical object.

Speaker 10 So that in itself can have particular energy states thanks to quantum mechanics and it's those energy states that we're trying to manipulate in these tiny little circuits.

Speaker 4 Okay, so you've got this flow that is so good that even though it's lots of electrons they are kind of so coordinated like a ballet that you can see them as one unit.

Speaker 10 Yeah that's right. So that's what superconductivity is.
Now the other ingredient in what they're doing here is something called quantum tunneling.

Speaker 10 So this is another quantum mechanical effect and it's very strange, as it often is in quantum mechanics.

Speaker 3 What a surprise.

Speaker 10 Yeah, well, so here it goes. I mean, it's not actually that difficult to understand conceptually.
Actually, how it's possible is another matter entirely.

Speaker 10 So if you imagine throwing a ball at a wall and it just bounces back at you, okay, and you have to throw it really, really hard if you're going to punch a hole through the wall.

Speaker 10 But if that ball were to describe by quantum mechanics, then there's a small chance that that it will actually be able to go through the wall and appear on the far side, even if it hasn't got enough energy to punch its way through.

Speaker 10 That's what quantum tunnelling is. And, you know, again, it normally happens at very small scales.
But it looked like this big current of paired-up electrons.

Speaker 10 You could get a tunnelling effect in a particular kind of superconducting ring. So that's really what they were looking for.

Speaker 4 Okay, so a big thing that you can almost see manages to punch its way through the wall.

Speaker 10 Yeah, that's essentially it. In these little loops of superconducting wire, there's a sort of gap and that sort of acts like a junction that the current has to tunnel through.

Speaker 4 I'm going to skip over the how because that does sound like magic. Good.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 4 And it's something that quantum physicists argue about. But yeah, you've hinted at uses for this.
So let's talk about that.

Speaker 10 Right. Well, because of this tunneling effect, you've got different charge states, basically with different numbers of electrons in, that the current can tunnel between.

Speaker 10 So it can switch from one of these states to the other. A system that has two or more different states, that's what you want to have to use as bits in computing.

Speaker 10 So in our classical computers, in our laptops and so on, we've essentially got little switches and you can switch them from one state of conductivity to another.

Speaker 10 If you can use quantum mechanics to do that switching, then you can build a quantum computer.

Speaker 10 And what's special about that is that instead of having a little switch that's either on or off, or is either a one or a zero in, you know, representing binary code in a computer, you can create states that are called superpositions.

Speaker 10 And they're often talked about, this is a very crude way of putting it, they're often talked about as being in both of the two possible states at the same time.

Speaker 10 That flexibility gives you a whole new way of doing computing that you don't have in our regular computers.

Speaker 10 And it means that for some tasks at least, you could do with maybe a handful of quantum bits like this, what you couldn't do with the billions and billions of bits that you have in today's best supercomputers.

Speaker 10 And it turns out that these little loops of superconducting wire are just what you want for quantum bits.

Speaker 4 Okay, so this experiment back in the 80s was that sort of the thing that took something that was a theory into the realm of practical, and that's the basis of quantum computers?

Speaker 10 Yeah, that's pretty much it.

Speaker 10 And now it turns out that the quantum computers, certainly the ones that are being made by companies like IBM and Google, which actually Martinez and Devere are both now consultants for, these quantum computers, they're really still prototypes, but they use exactly this.

Speaker 10 They use these superconducting quantum bits as their little little switches.

Speaker 4 And I mean, looking ahead, are we all going to have quantum computers on our laptops, or is the fact that this system needs to be really, really cold to make this quantum effect happen?

Speaker 4 Is that going to be a problem?

Speaker 10 The fact that they have to be really cold needn't be a problem.

Speaker 10 And in fact, there are now other ways of doing quantum computing that might not need to be, you know, cooled down at least quite as much.

Speaker 10 It's really that using quantum computers is only going to be valuable for certain certain kinds of tasks. There are some kinds of computation that it can do very well.
For example, search algorithms.

Speaker 10 When you're searching a load of stuff, quantum computing could do that very efficiently.

Speaker 10 Or if you're trying to optimize planning logistics and you have all these different routes that you have to go down and you want to do that most efficiently, that's the sort of task quantum computing does well.

Speaker 10 If we're talking about doing computer graphics or something, there's no reason anyone knows of at the moment why there should be any advantage in using quantum computing for that.

Speaker 10 So I think it's very unlikely that we're going to have quantum laptops because, you know, they're just not going to be general purpose enough devices.

Speaker 4 Well, we're going to have to leave it there. Thank you, Phil Ball, for coming on and making all of that incredibly clear.

Speaker 4 And if people want an even slower version, if you can't get enough of quantum or Phil's insight into it, then my documentary, What is Quantum, will be on radio for soon.

Speaker 4 It's tunnelled somewhere into the schedules, but we'll pick it out and put it on air soon.

Speaker 11 When someone walks into your workplace, a guest, a contract, or a delivery, do you really know who they are? That's where SignIn App comes in.

Speaker 11 It's the simple secure visitor management system that replaces paper logs with instant visibility.

Speaker 11 Scan an ID, sign in, and you'll know exactly who's on site and why they're there because confidence starts with control.

Speaker 11 Over 22,000 businesses already trust SignINAP to keep their workplaces safe, professional, and welcoming. Try it free at signinapp.com.
Smart, secure sign in for workplaces.

Speaker 1 Tires matter. They're the only part of your vehicle that touches the road, and they're responsible for so much.
Acceleration, braking, steering, and handling.

Speaker 1 Tread confidently with new tires from Tire Rack. Whether you're looking for expert recommendations or know exactly what you want, Tire Rack makes it easy.

Speaker 1 You'll get fast, free shipping, free road hazard protection, and convenient installation options. Try mobile installation.
They'll bring your new tires to your home or office and install them on site.

Speaker 1 Tire Rack has the best selection of tires from world-class brands and they don't just sell tires, they test them on the road and on their test track.

Speaker 1 Learn how the tires you want tackle evasive maneuvers, drive and stop in the rain, or just handle your everyday commute.

Speaker 1 Go to tirerack.com to see their tire test results, tire ratings, and consumer reviews. And be sure to check out all the current special offers.

Speaker 1 That's tirerack.com, tire rack.com, The way tire buying should be.

Speaker 4 Now from Quantum to Quetzocoatlas. For those not acquainted, that's a giant prehistoric heron with 11 meter-long wings, largest ever flying animal.

Speaker 4 Sometimes science can underpin technological revolutions. See this week's Nobels.
Other times it can reset your sense of awe and joy when news and modern life seem a bit bleak.

Speaker 4 Normally, Inside Science talks to scientists who find, analyse, and classify remnants of Earth's history. What we haven't done yet is talk to a comedian about gazing at those remnants.

Speaker 4 And now is the time to correct that oversight since Josie Long has themed her new stand-up show around extinct megafauna.

Speaker 12 Yes, finally, you've got someone in who doesn't know what they're talking about. And I'm so happy to represent that contingent.

Speaker 3 It's very important.

Speaker 4 Radio 4 listeners will know you as comedian, novelist, and broadcaster of the award-winning and much-missed shortcuts.

Speaker 4 Josie, you're on the show because you're midway through a UK tour with your latest show, which is called Now is the Time of Monsters, and you had me at Extinct Prehistoric Mega Fauna.

Speaker 4 I'm hoping that here you can help me make the case that science is good for the soul by staring at extinct animals?

Speaker 12 Oh, yes, I deeply, deeply believe it. There are a lot of reasons why I wanted to write a stand-up show focusing on prehistoric extinct charismatic megafauna.
Not dinosaurs.

Speaker 12 I think dinosaurs get all the oxygen, you know, they're very

Speaker 12 well publicized and thought about. But essentially, my first entry into it was me and my daughter reading books about it and suddenly realising that the handle I thought I had on it was pathetic.

Speaker 12 Like, I was just like, yeah, woolly mammoths.

Speaker 12 It's like, no, there were so many completely different species still around 10,000, 15,000, 30,000 years ago, alongside human beings that were so similar, if not identical to us.

Speaker 12 But I couldn't believe how few I knew about. I couldn't believe how recently they were here.

Speaker 12 I think something that honestly breaks my heart is thinking about how many remains of prehistoric animals from only about 10,000 years ago are so close to us and just kind of being ignored and not studied and not dug up and not really thought about.

Speaker 4 I mean, you're in Glasgow. Is there anything in any of the museums? Is there a kind of something that you've come across?

Speaker 12 Oh, thank you for asking. Yes, Kelvin Grove has a giant Irish elk.
It has woolly rhinoceros bones.

Speaker 12 I don't know if you've been to Bishop Briggs, but like the thought that it was teeming with woolly rhinoceroses. It's a joy and a delight and it's so exciting to me.

Speaker 12 But I think one of the reasons it's a balm at the moment moment is I think about the scale and the pace of climate change and how terrifying that is.

Speaker 12 And I think about human beings surviving the end of the ice age and so many of these giant animals not, and about how few of us survived and yet we did, and how much less they had in terms of technology understanding, you know, all kinds of things.

Speaker 12 And when I think about that, it does give me some hope that we have a chance to have a future.

Speaker 12 Why else do I really love it?

Speaker 12 I do think it's a tonic for the soul because it reminds you of the sheer potential of the world, how wonderful, diverse, exciting and unusual it is and it feels like magic but it was real.

Speaker 12 When I found out that there was a giant ground sloth up to six meters tall that was here until 10,000 years ago.

Speaker 4 I can't believe it. I mean, I saw the bones in the Natural History Museum in London and I missed it.
I walked underneath it and it was only when I turned around and I was like, oh, what's that?

Speaker 4 It's a sloth the size of an elephant.

Speaker 12 Yes, and here's the thing that is so exciting about it is this was here 10,000 years ago alongside someone just like me and the person like me didn't even realize yet that it was weird.

Speaker 12 They just thought they were just like, yeah, I guess this is a normal animal. Obviously it's not.

Speaker 8 It's ridiculous.

Speaker 12 And I think about the fact that they dug tunnels under the ground 100,000 years ago, networks of tunnels that are still there, and that people can drive cars down.

Speaker 12 And like, I think some of these ideas or facts are just intellectually delicious to me.

Speaker 4 So if you gave a bunch of primary school children pen and paper and said, draw me an animal, it probably did exist at some point.

Speaker 12 That's how I feel. And also, would it really be weirder than an elephant with a shovel for a mouth?

Speaker 3 No.

Speaker 4 And that was real.

Speaker 12 You know, would it be weirder than those rhinoceros that had like five or six bumpy trefoil horns?

Speaker 3 No.

Speaker 12 I feel like anything your child could draw, you'd be like, bad luck. Mother nature has done it weirder.

Speaker 4 Doesn't looking at extinct animals make you sort of depressed? I mean, the giant moa, I'm gutted that there is no longer a bird that

Speaker 4 name translates as giant chicken because they were too delicious and we ate them all about 700 years ago.

Speaker 12 Yes, there definitely is a bit of that, like especially learning about it with my daughter, and the answer to about 80% of them is human beings thrived and we killed them all.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, it is depressing.

Speaker 12 I'd love to see a glyptodon. It's very, very sad that people turn them all into little funny little tents.

Speaker 12 And I think for me, writing the show, for all of the delight and wonder, the show itself is about balancing and managing existential dread and trying to cope with living in a landscape that feels metaphorically monstrous by dealing with kind of literal monsters and what that means.

Speaker 4 That was the very excellent Josie Long and you can catch now is the time of monsters around the UK over the next couple of months. Penny Sachet, new scientist managing editor, joins me in the studio.

Speaker 4 I'm not going to put you on the spot with extinct megafauna. I know you want to talk about Shackleton and his ill-fated ship, The Endurance.
I do.

Speaker 4 Yeah, so there's new research out this week and I did interview the author. so can we hear a clip from him? That's.

Speaker 13 I kind of wrote in the paper I just published that

Speaker 13 it may be in a poetic sense it was a strong ship, but unfortunately, in an engineering sense, it was not.

Speaker 4 That is Juka Tukeri from Aalto University in Finland. A strong ship, poetically, but not in an engineering sense, Penny, explain.

Speaker 8 It's not really what you want when you're going to Antarctica.

Speaker 8 Poetically strong ship. Yes, this is a study that's just come out looking at Ernest Shackleton and his famous ship, The Endurance.

Speaker 8 It was the wooden ship that he took to Antarctica in 1915 when he was planning to trek across the whole continent via the South Pole in the middle and famously it got trapped in sea ice and sank and the amazing thing is everyone survived and escaped.

Speaker 8 But there was this idea at the time that it was the world's strongest ship which I think is quite interesting because it's not it's around the same time as the unsinkable Titanic.

Speaker 8 A lot of hype about ships at this time it seems. And the new study suggests that not only was that not true, it wasn't the strongest ship, but Shackleton himself knew it wasn't.

Speaker 4 I find that extraordinary because, yes, in his letters to his wife, he said, you know, I'd swap this for the old one any day.

Speaker 8 Yeah, he mentioned the previous ship, the Nimrod, and this study, they looked at basically the state-of-the-art technology of the boats at the time. And

Speaker 8 those that were the strongest, they had all kinds of tech box-like rooms on the lower deck that kind of reinforced the bottom of a ship. They had shallower keels, slightly different shapes.

Speaker 8 And it turns out that the endurance didn't really actually measure up to this kind of state-of-the-art best, strongest boats at the time. And this kind of was the ship's downfall.

Speaker 8 The pressures from ice when you're sailing through sea ice are incredibly strong, and the keel of the ship did develop this huge hole, and that was the problem with the expedition.

Speaker 8 Where did that idea come from that it was the strongest ship?

Speaker 8 It possibly originated in the Times of London, but what this study suggests is that Shackleton sort of didn't downplay that maybe.

Speaker 8 He continued continued to perpetuate it even though he knew it wasn't true.

Speaker 4 Well, that got him off the hook, didn't it?

Speaker 8 Yes, yeah, yes. I guess to claim that you're using the best possible ship, even if you're not.

Speaker 4 Can we talk about the moon?

Speaker 8 Yes.

Speaker 8 Good week for moons. Did you see the super moon?

Speaker 4 Isn't it lovely?

Speaker 8 It was gorgeous.

Speaker 4 What makes something a super moon?

Speaker 8 I think it's to do with the shape of the orbit of the moon. Sometimes it is actually a little bit closer to us than others.

Speaker 8 And so especially when it's rising or falling at the start or end of the night, it just looks that much bigger.

Speaker 4 You're going to tell me something else about the moon.

Speaker 8 This is about the biggest crater on the moon and how it was formed, and you can't actually see it no matter how big the moon looks because it's on the far side.

Speaker 8 And this is the South Pole Aitken Basin. It's more than four billion years old.
It formed just a few million years after the moon itself formed.

Speaker 8 And it's massive, it's thousands of kilometers wide, 12 kilometers deep.

Speaker 8 And we thought it probably formed when an asteroid kind of moved from the south up northwards in that direction because the crater itself has a buildup of rubble on the northern rim.

Speaker 8 And I guess if you imagine kind of pushing an object into sand, you get a kind of buildup of crud at the end.

Speaker 8 But now a study has traced the shape of the crater, and it's not what you'd expect if that were so.

Speaker 8 So they've looked at similar other craters, and at the southern end, it's actually kind of thinner than it would be at the northern end, which suggests that it went in the opposite direction. And

Speaker 8 taking all of this together, what it's suggesting suggesting is that this was a really kind of unusual type of asteroid strike that possibly churned up the insides of the moon, which was still kind of liquid magma and in the process of solidifying.

Speaker 8 And so, what this means is those

Speaker 8 that rubble that's on the northern rim could actually come from deep within the moon. And it's so hard to know anything about the inside of the moon for obvious reasons.

Speaker 8 But there may actually be these ancient rocks right there on the rim. And guess what? We're going there.

Speaker 8 NASA Artemis III are planning to go to that rim anyway to look for water, but hopefully now they might be able to pick up a few of these ancient rocks.

Speaker 4 That's efficiency.

Speaker 4 And finally, you're going to talk about inheriting fitness.

Speaker 8 Not fitness in the sort of Darwinian sense, fitness in the hitting the gym sense. And this was a study that looked at mice, specifically fit male mice.

Speaker 8 So these are mice that trained on treadmills for a few weeks. Hilarious.

Speaker 8 And they found that those that did boost their fitness went on to have fitter sons that were actually healthier and better at running.

Speaker 8 And when they pinned this down it looked like genetic snippets, microRNA as they're called, were passing into the sperm of these fitter, healthier mice and passing on some of these traits to their sons.

Speaker 8 And these included kind of genetic instructions that would encourage cells to make more mitochondria, for example, which helps you make more energy, which has a direct influence on how far you can run and your endurance.

Speaker 4 This slightly freaks me out a bit because

Speaker 4 it's so so different to what we are taught about how things are inherited.

Speaker 8 Yes, yeah. And also, there's a bit of a mystery there because they saw this effect in the sons but not in the daughters.
And I don't know what that's about. I don't really understand that.

Speaker 8 I think there's still a lot for us to learn about when there are little molecules that aren't on our chromosomes but are getting into our germ cells.

Speaker 8 What kinds of things are we passing on to our children? And we're only starting to lift the lid on that, I think.

Speaker 4 Well, Penny, thank you so much. That's nice to end on a mystery, I think.
That's it for this week.

Speaker 4 Next week Victoria Gill on the art and science of playing games with an actual faithful from the Traitors. For now from Penny it's goodbye.

Speaker 8 Bye.

Speaker 4 And from me cheerio.

Speaker 4 You've been listening to BBC Inside Science with me Marnie Chesterton. The producers were Claire Salisbury, Ella Hubber and Jonathan Blackwell.

Speaker 4 Technical production was by Matt Chamberlain and Bob Nettles. The show was made in Cardiff by BBC Wales and West.

Speaker 4 To discover more fascinating science content, head to bbc.co.uk, search for BBC Inside Science, and follow the links to the Open University.

Speaker 6 You ever sit there staring at your plate thinking, why can't this pasta be just a little healthier without ruining it? Yeah, me too. That's why I started using Monch Bonch.
It's like a food wingman.

Speaker 6 It steps in when your meal's trying to sabotage you. It blocks extra carbs and sugars before your body gets them, adds fiber your gut actually loves, and keeps your blood sugar from roller coaster.

Speaker 6 So yeah, I still eat the pasta. I just don't pay for it later.
Make your food work for you, not against you. Go to Monchmonch.shop and see what your meals could be with a little backup.

Speaker 7 It's time your hard-earned money works harder for you. With the Wealthfront Cash account, your uninvested cash earns a 3.5% APY, which is higher than the average savings rate.

Speaker 7 No account fees, no minimums, and free instant withdrawals to eligible accounts anytime. Join over a million people who trust Wealthfront to build wealth at wealthfront.com.

Speaker 7 Cash account offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC, member FINRA SIPC, and is not a bank. APY on deposits as of November 7th, 2025 is representative, subject to change, and requires no minimum.

Speaker 7 Funds are swept to program banks where they earn the variable APY.